Hugh Blair Grigsby - Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell

H >> Hugh Blair Grigsby >> Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12

There was a branch of the old Bank of the United States, whose entire
capital, distributed over the Union, was only ten millions. There was as
yet, and fourteen years later, no daily paper. The _Herald_, then in its
ninth year, was published three times a week, and was the organ of the
democratic party. It was not until two years later that the _Ledger_
appeared in the field, under the lead of that able champion John Cowper,
and gave the federal flag to the breeze. More than fourteen years were
to elapse before a daily paper was established. The equinoctial storms
sadly worried our fathers. From the imperfect filling in of the streets
and wharves, the tides rose high; and then, if we would keep out of
sight St. Mark's, the Rialto, and the palaces of merchant princes,
Norfolk was another edition of Venice. The canoe was our gondola, and
"_yo heave oh_" were our echoes of Tasso. A bold stream, that would
float a vessel of one hundred tons, cut Granby and Bank streets in two,
and just halted on the west side of Church, where it was almost met by
another furious stream from Newton's Creek. At Town Bridge a torrent
raged that was not to be crossed until the tide fell. Freemason, between
Brewer and Granby, presented a sea deep enough to float a vessel of one
hundred tons. Our Rialto on Granby was not erected till eighteen or
twenty years later; and I remember our fathers were so proud of it, that
they invited strangers to see it. It took, for a time, the shine from
the Navy Yard. The health of the town ranked the lowest. The tombstones
in old St. Paul's tell of the number of captains of vessels and trading
merchants who died here. The letters of Wirt show the prevalent belief
that an acclimating process was just as necessary here as at New Orleans
and Havana, or on the coast of Africa. It was the fear of yellow fever,
perpetually dinned in his ears by his country friends, who but echoed
the popular belief, that drove Wirt away. Such was Norfolk, not
enveloped in the mists of tradition, but such as she was, when Mr.
Tazewell came to reside here in 1802.

He lived to behold a very different state of things. He lived to see it
one of the cleanest cities in the world, and to see more miles of paved
streets in Norfolk than any other city south of the Potomac can boast
of; and those streets lighted up every night with a brilliancy equal to
that which a rejoicing people, thirteen years later than 1802, kindled
in commemoration of the victory of New Orleans, and of the peace with
Great Britain. He lived to see the Negro population as well clad, and
the female part of it as fully crinolined, as the great body of the
respectable white people of 1802, and worshipping every Sabbath in
churches of their own, better and more costly than the best church of
that day; while the white people have added, and are adding every day,
church to church and chapel to chapel, some of which are even elegant in
their architecture, and all comfortable in their arrangements beyond the
conceptions of that day. He lived to see, instead of three men worth one
hundred thousand each, three men, one of whom he was, whose united
wealth would reach a million, besides many others with one hundred
thousand down to ten thousand. He lived to see the population increased
from seven thousand to seventeen thousand; and, to say the least, fully
as well clad, as well fed, as their fathers ever were, and living in
better houses than their fathers ever lived in. He lived to see our
banking capital, whether invested in public banks, in savings
institutions, and in the hands of private bankers, swell above the
fragmentary portion which the old Bank of the United States could afford
to allot to us, to somewhat over two millions of dollars, almost wholly
owned by our own people; and to read our monthly bills of mortality,
which attest, beyond the reach of cavil, a condition of general health
without a parallel in the annals of cities laved by the tides. He lived
to see the farmers, who supplied the population of 1802 with vegetables
and fish enough to serve, but none to spare, ship off nearly half a
million's worth to the north every season; and to see land in the
neighborhood, which in 1802 was worth hardly anything more than what the
doctor reaped from its crop of agues, become salubrious, and sell for
fifty dollars an acre. He lived to see our city connected with the West,
the South, and the North, by steamships whose tonnage would in those
days have been pronounced fabulous, by railways, and by the magnetic
telegraph. He lived to see a larger tonnage arriving and departing
annually from our port than ever was seen in our most prosperous days.
The old figure of trade has, indeed, passed away; and some wharf owners,
some warehouse men, and some others do not reap the profits of old
times, though, by the way, we now have more and better wharves, more and
better warehouses, than they had at that day; and the cause and the
necessity of the change are obvious. The trade of our fathers in 1802
was an unnatural trade. It was a fungus that sprung from the diseased
condition of foreign powers. It was not the result of developed
productive wealth, but the accident of the war between the two greatest
commercial nations of the globe, which gave us the carrying trade. It
was born of other people's troubles, and destined to die when those
troubles were appeased. It may be safely affirmed, that the business of
Norfolk, the natural result of enterprise, progress, and development,
and not the offspring of foreign action, at Mr. Tazewell's death,
exceeded, in a large degree, the business of Norfolk in 1802, puffed up,
as it was, by ephemeral causes, and that the present wealth of our
people immeasurably surpasses the wealth of the past.

Whatever may have been the rate of legal compensation in 1802, some
description of the leading members of the bar of that day is
indispensable to the canvas, of which Mr. Tazewell is the principal
figure. Besides Hyott, who lived in the retired mansion in which our
venerable fellow-citizen, John Southgate, now resides, and whose name
has long been extinct, and Marsh, who studied in the famous law school
of Judge Reeves, at Lichfield, where Calhoun was initiated in the
mysteries of the law, who built that handsome wooden house in the
fields, long since burned down, in which the youth of my day were
flogged through the rudiments of Ruddiman, and whose sons are among the
enterprising merchants and sea-captains of our modern city, was, first
and foremost, General THOMAS MATHEWS. There he stands, with the figure
of Apollo and with the spirit of Mars, clad in the blue and buff of the
revolution, wearing that sword which he had worn through the struggle
with the mother country, his well-powdered head surmounted by the old
cocked hat which he had worn when driven from Fort Nelson by the
myrmidons of his British namesake, and at the siege of York, and with
that long queue, the dressing of which was the no mean labor of the
toilet of that era. To his dying day, which happened on the eve of the
late war with Great Britain, though a general of brigade, on all stated
musters he appeared in the field in full uniform, and was greeted by old
and young with applause. He was a native of St. Kitts, left the island
before the revolution, performed his part gallantly through the entire
contest for independence, and had long been a member of the House of
Delegates, of which he was again and again elected speaker, performing
the duties of the chair with a dignity, firmness, and grace still
freshly remembered, and bequeathing his name to a beautiful county
overlooking the waters of the Chesapeake, which it still bears. He
served in the assembly at a memorable period. The questions of the age
were to be settled. He recorded his name in favor of the bill
establishing religious freedom, where it will shine for ever. He voted
for the resolution convoking the meeting at Annapolis, which was the
seminal germ of the present federal constitution. He voted to send
delegates to the Federal Convention, which formed the present federal
constitution; and in the convention which ratified that instrument in
the name of Virginia, he voted for its adoption; and when Norfolk
commemorated the installation of the federal constitution by the firing
of guns, by the display of flags, by civic, mechanical, and military
processions, conspicuous on that great day was the general, who acted as
the Chief Priest of the august ceremonies which honored the birth of a
nation. He was always elected to any office to which the people could
call him. His address had the tinge of the soldier, but was most
fascinating. No familiarity could impair its effect. The bar regarded
him with affection and reverence. All the men about town loved him. The
women almost adored him. A smile from the General on a gala-day, when
mounted on his charger, which he managed well to the last, or the
lifting of his three-cornered hat on the sidewalk, was a trophy which
the prettiest woman, maid or matron, would treasure away among the
_spolia opima_ of her hoard. His social position was of the highest. He
was known far and wide, and played most becomingly the part of host to
distinguished persons from abroad. Some of our old citizens remember the
coaches and four which used to pass down King's lane to his modest
residence at the foot of tide. One of the acts of his life was
characteristic. He was on a visit to his brother at St. Kitts, when the
French fleet lay-to off the island, and levied a sum of money upon the
people, which they paid. The French then levied another sum, which the
people of the island were wholly unable to pay. In this dilemma the
people of St. Kitts had recourse to General Mathews, who, dressed in his
uniform as an American general officer, went on board the hostile fleet,
and induced the admiral to accept an order from him on the American
Consul in Paris, for the sum in question. The fleet then sailed away,
and the island was safe. In due time the order came back protested. Suit
was brought and judgment obtained against him, and the venerable patriot
spent his last days in prison bounds for a debt which the British
Government ought to have paid with gratitude as well as with money. In
1802 he was approaching his sixtieth year, but was vigorous and
attentive to business. He was a fine speaker. His voice was melodious,
and its compass exceeded belief. It could be heard along the line of a
whole brigade, and in the clatter of a skirmish. It is one of the
traditions of the bar, that he could, by condensing his voice as he
approached it, break a pane of glass in pieces. His learning was
respectable; and with the jury he had great weight; and he was heard
with respect by the court; and always having lived and practised in
sea-ports, he had no inconsiderable knowledge of the law of admiralty.
In the Chesapeake war, old as he was, his spirit fired up. He took
command as brigadier, and longed for another crack at the British. His
descendants still survive, and one of them holds an important federal
office in our modern city. With all the demonstrations of public grief,
his remains were committed to the grave in the south-east angle of the
yard of St. Paul's.

Another leader of the bar was the venerable JAMES NIMMO. His tall form,
neatly attired in black, and bent low as in grateful obeisance to the
rapid years which were bringing him nearer to his heavenly home; that
broad belt of baldness that stretched over from his forehead to his
spine, those silver side-locks that ran wild about his collar, that
honest, peculiar voice, which sounded as if virtue and piety, descending
awhile from the upper sphere, were helping the old man out in his
speech; with the freshness of yesterday I see and hear them all. Though
seemingly attended by celestial visitants, and perhaps for that reason,
he had not a particle of Young America about him. He believed that
rogues and scamps ought to be punished as promptly and as condignly now
as in the days of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, and as in the days of
his own early youth; and while he was the aid and comforter of the widow
and the fatherless, and of the virtuous poor,--would weep and pray with
them, and help them out of that slim purse, which never held an unworthy
shilling, he was, as Commonwealth's attorney, the terror of evil-doers.
I remember on one occasion, when he was prosecuting a notorious offender
whom he sent to the penitentiary, and who was defended by Gen. Taylor,
as the old man was bald, and the air of the old court-house was damp, he
threw over his head a red bandanna handkerchief, and I hear the laugh
which Gen. Taylor extorted from the bench, from the jury, and from the
old man himself, by calling it a bloody flag. He was of that substantial
class of lawyers, who, having received an elementary grounding in Latin
and mathematics in the schools of the time, entered the clerk's office,
and served a term of duty within its precincts. He was thus well versed
in the ordinary forms of the law, and with the decisions of the courts
in leading cases; and took the hue rather of an attorney than of an
advocate. With such men as a class, there was no great intimacy with the
law as a science, and its higher philosophy was beyond their reach. Like
Mathews, however, he had always lived in sea-ports, and as he studied
his cases well, he was always very impressive with the jury, and was
heard with great respect by the court; and when he had reached the
zenith, a slow shake of the head or even of his finger at an argument
that was too hard for him, went a great way even with the court, and
almost all the way with the jury. As long as the case lay in the old
routine, this class of lawyers would get along very well; but novelties
were unpleasant to them; they hated the subtleties of special pleading;
and they turned pale at a demurrer. Possessed of a high spirit, which
sometimes, even beyond three-score, sent forth a flash as vivid as it
was sudden, he was placable and ever prompt to make an atonement. He was
now in his forty-eighth year, and in the full vigor of a temperate
middle life; but he lived to be the father of the bar for almost the
third of a century, and almost to be the father of the town, which in an
honorable sense he was; dying in January, 1833, at the age of
seventy-eight, and laid away by the hands of descendants among
patrimonial graves at Shenstone Green. He was a true patriot. In the
hour of her fiercest trial he stood by the side of Virginia. While so
many men of wealth and influence in the neighboring counties of Princess
Anne and Norfolk, impelled by their fears, present and prospective, of
British power, and living within the range of British guns, faltered in
their faith to the young republic, and took British protection, Nimmo
clung to the standard of his country; and, having been taken prisoner,
was confined on board the Liverpool frigate when she fired the shot
which, striking the south-eastern angle of St. Paul's Church, has left
its mark for posterity. One recollection personal to myself shows this
fine old man in an amiable view. I had received, at the age of
one-and-twenty, an important trust from the people of Norfolk; and Mr.
Nimmo, meeting me in the street the morning after the election, and
taking in his own pure hands both of mine, said: "My young friend,
remember that you owe a double service--service to your God as well as
to your country; and that he who is faithless to the God of his fathers
can never be faithful to his country." And now, when the day of ambition
with me is long past and gone, and when that day of retribution, which,
as it cometh to all, so it shall come to us, is drawing nigh, I may say
that it ever has been my fervent and steadfast prayer to be able to
illustrate in my humble life the precept of my pious friend.

There was another lawyer, the junior of Nimmo by five years, whose
subsequent intimate connexion with Mr. Tazewell makes it proper to
recall his position here. The name of Col. JOHN NIVISON was pronounced
with pride by our fathers, and deserves to be held in grateful
remembrance. None under seventy can recall him as he pleaded at the bar;
and none under fifty, and very few of that age, can recall him as he sat
in the chair of the Recorder. That office was justly held in high repute
in olden time. Sir John Randolph held it; and at a later day it was held
by the celebrated Edmund Randolph, the great grandson of the knight, and
by the eloquent and accomplished Henry Tazewell. Then it was usually
bestowed upon some prominent lawyer who had retired from the bar, and
within my recollection it has ever been held by upright, intelligent,
and honorable men. I see this old man, too, with the freshness of the
passing hour, as he was driving out in his capacious chariot to
Lawson's, or as he strolled or rather rocked along the sidewalk. He was
very large, weighing between two and three hundred, and was nearly six
feet in height. He said he had no idea of his bulk until, passing a
negro woman in the street with a basket on her head who took a side
glance at him, he heard her unconsciously exclaim: "Good gracious, what
a big white man!" He was born in 1760, in Brunswick as Brunswick then
was, was educated at William and Mary, while Wythe was professor of law,
having as his college associates John Marshall, Spencer Roane, the
amiable and patriotic Samuel Hardy, who was destined to fall too soon,
and at whose grave Virginia sat in mourning, Archibald Stuart, Bushrod
Washington, William Short, our Minister to Spain, _et alii haud
impares_: was one of the founders of the Phi Beta Kappa Society--an
institution which will make his name immortal--and began the practice of
the law in his native county. After the peace of 1783, he took up his
abode in Portsmouth, where he reached the head of the bar; and in the
great hegira from that town on the adoption of the federal constitution
in 1788, he came over to Norfolk, where he had now long held the front
rank in his profession. He too had passed a noviciate in the Clerk's
office, had studied law under the guidance of Wythe, and had been very
successful. Like Nimmo, he was called the honest lawyer; and it was one
of the sly jests of our fathers that there should be two lawyers at the
same bar and in the same generation, whose claims to the title should be
generally conceded by the people. In 1802 he had reached his
forty-second year; and having acquired a competent fortune--for
moderation was the order of those times--he was soon to withdraw from
the bar, and to fill the chair of the Recorder. He is said to have been
very successful in making lawyers eloquent and entertaining while he was
on the bench. Whether he was fond of the classics, I cannot affirm; but
he certainly borrowed a trait from Homer, and nodded occasionally; and
when a tedious speaker began his harangue, having already taken a full
view of the law and facts of the case, he usually fell asleep, waking up
as the counsel finished his harangue, much refreshed at least, if not
instructed by it, and proceeded to give judgment in the case. He was
noted for his tenderness to the poor, and it is said that he had on
their account almost as much business after he withdrew from the bar as
before. He died in 1820, at the age of sixty, and was buried in St.
Paul's, within a few feet of his compatriot Mathews. When Col. Nivison,
in December, 1776, was returning to his lodgings after organizing the
Phi Beta Kappa Society, he might have seen a pretty infant of two years
in the nurse's arms, or toddling in the shade of Waller's grove; but he
could not have foreseen that the same little fellow would in the course
of time worry him with all the art of the special pleader, and finally
receive from him the hand of his eldest daughter; and that when he
should withdraw from the bar, he was to leave all his business in the
hands of that child.

But there was a young man, a member of the bar in 1802, whose elegant
person, whose winning address, whose uncommon abilities, which were
associated with industry and perseverance quite as uncommon, and whose
glowing patriotism, would have made an impression in any country and in
any age, and gained distinction in any sphere. Under such a portrait the
name of one man only can be written--that of ROBERT BARRAUD TAYLOR.
Young Taylor was eleven months older than Tazewell, was born in
Smithfield, attended in Norfolk the school of that elegant scholar, the
late Dr. Alexander Whitehead, became a student of William and Mary
College, where he remained till his duel with John Randolph, in which he
received a ball that he carried to his grave; studied law with Judge
Marshall, and in 1796, at the age of twenty-two, engaged in the practice
of the law in this city. His fine talents attracted universal attention,
and business crowded upon him. His voice, action, eloquence, were all in
fine harmony. As the district court system was then in operation, he had
an opportunity of witnessing the displays of the leading counsel of the
state in the neighboring town of Suffolk; and it was the dictate alike
of interest and ambition to prepare himself for the conflict with his
ablest contemporaries. Politics were the order of the day; and they soon
engaged the attention of young Taylor. I heard many years ago, that when
he came to the bar, and some time afterwards, he sided with his college
mates Tazewell, Randolph, Cabell, Thompson, and James Barbour, and
hailed with rapture the progress of the French revolution; but, shocked
by the barbarities which disgraced the later stages of that moral and
political maelstrom, and indignant at the unprecedented conduct of the
diplomatic agents of France in our own country, he determined to
separate from his early friends, and to uphold with all his influence
the administration of Washington and that of his successor. It is said
that he read with unmixed feelings of admiration and delight the
Reflections of Burke on the French Revolution, which had appeared about
six years before; and, if that work vanquished his early love of France,
he may be said at least to have fallen by a noble hand. At such a crisis
of foreign and domestic affairs, it was impossible that a young man with
such powers of eloquence and such fearlessness of spirit should be
allowed to remain at home, while all his old associates, and the oldest
and ablest politicians of the state were about to assemble in Richmond,
and to battle for the victory. He was accordingly returned, in 1799, by
the Borough of Norfolk to the House of Delegates, on the floor of which
the contest was to be decided. At the session of the previous year, the
Assembly had passed the celebrated resolutions of John Taylor of
Caroline, long since known to have been written by Mr. Madison, which
had been sent to the several states. The leading object of the present
session was to refer the answers of the states to a committee, and to
report an argument in defence of the resolutions of the previous year.
The report, since so well known as the Report of '99, or the Virginia
Report, drawn by Madison, was the consequence. When it was presented to
the House of Delegates, it was discussed by the prominent men of both
parties with eminent ability. Young Taylor performed his part with his
usual zeal and force, and, by the side of his illustrious namesake,
George Keith Taylor, opposed the adoption of the Report, which
prevailed, however, by a decided majority. He also sustained Mr. Adams
for the presidency in preference to Mr. Jefferson; and, when Mr.
Jefferson was elected, he opposed his administration up to 1802, when
Tazewell came to reside in Norfolk. Though opposed then, and as long as
he lived, to the party which, with few and short intermissions, has
controlled, from 1789 to the present day, the political action of the
state, his devotion to our blessed mother was as pure and as ardent as
was ever felt by any son who drew nurture from her bosom; and he was as
prompt to avenge her wrongs as to assert her rights--at once a
D'Aguessau in the forum and a Bayard in the field. Nor was that
affection unreturned. When the clouds of war were gathering round her,
Virginia entrusted her safety and her honor to his sword; and when the
returning light of peace shone upon her hills and valleys and over the
green savannahs of the East, and he had withdrawn from the arena of his
splendid fame, she invested him with her ermine, which he wore with
becoming grace to his dying hour; and she stood in tears at his tomb.

In this young man, Tazewell was to find an intimate friend, a fit, an
able, and a lifelong competitor. They were nearly of the same age: they
had been classmates in College, and had been in the Assembly together;
and while Tazewell was studying law in Mr. Wickham's office in Richmond,
Taylor was following suit a few doors off in the office of Gen.
Marshall. Even on the score of physical beauty they were not unmatched.
Though belonging to different models, each in his sphere was, in youth,
in middle life, and in old age, among the finest looking men of their
generation. Sometimes the aspect of Taylor was magnificent. I saw him
one afternoon thirty years ago as he was returning from the court in
Portsmouth. He was passing from Toy and King's corner to Hall's. The
waves of recent debate were sweltering in his breast. His person was
erect; his gait was rapid; with one hand he held his cloak in a graceful
fold, and with the other he grasped his ivory curule staff. I thought of
Cicero hastening up the Capitoline hill to announce in the forum the
death of Catiline on the Picenian plain and the slaughter of the
traitor's band.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12